A voice in the dark

A few months ago, I gave this introduction to a performance of Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet, given by my wife's quartet. If you are not familiar with the piece, try this from the Borodin Quartet.

Few artists have come to represent their own time and place as much as Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s preeminent composer who, from the 1920s until his death in the 1970s, was Russia’s musical propagandist, conscience, provocateur and human voice.

From its earliest details, Shostakovich’s life was a tool of Soviet propaganda. Born in 1906, he is alleged to have witnessed Lenin’s return to Russia, from exile, in 1917. At 18, his precocious 1^st Symphony was trumpeted around the world as a dazzling example of a new wave of Soviet artists. This new paradise of Communist Russia seemed, at first, a haven of artistic freedom: as long as what you said was ideologically sound, it didn’t really matter how you said it.

Like so many others, Shostakovich was lulled into a false sense of security, pushing the boundaries of the musical language until firmly bitten by the culturally and socially conservative crackdown of Joseph Stalin’s first years as leader of the Soviet Union. Art was no longer to test the limits; only artistic expression which the masses could easily understand, and which celebrated the greatness of the communist utopia, would do. In this new hell of rigid rules, denunciations and show trials, one misstep could mean death. Writers, artists, theatre and film directors, friends of Shostakovich, disappeared, swallowed by the human meat grinder of Stalin’s genocidal state. Footsteps in the hall; a knock at the door; a visit to the headquarters of the secret police: thousands were erased from life like this and not even their families would dare mention their names again.

Shostakovich’s brush with danger came in 1936, in the form of a damning newspaper review, ordered, it is believed, by Stalin himself. The state newspaper, Pravda, blasted his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, as “chaos instead of music”. The message was clear – adapt or die. The composer, eventually, offered his own amends for his past wrongs in the form of a Symphony. The symphony was his fifth and, like Beethoven’s, it rises from fierce darkness to a conclusion of blazing light. But little mattered more to Shostakovich than personal artistic integrity. Within the triumphant bombast of the Symphony’s finale, a kernel of defiance could be heard – a grin through gritted teeth. Shostakovich’s admirers heard this, the authorities did not, and the pattern was set for a new musical identity of outward conformity and inner resilience.

Little did he know, though, that in allowing for the possibility of contradictory meanings, Shostakovich would unleash a bitter battle to interpret his music. Some have tried to dismiss him as a propagandist hack; others find anti-communist barbs in every note; others still find a middle ground that celebrates him as a composer of hugely affecting and original music. Nowhere is this battleground of meaning more intensely fought than in the 8^th String Quartet. Shostakovich began writing the piece during a visit to Dresden in 1960. The visit may have inspired the dedication “to the victims of fascism and war”, but clues in the very music itself point toward an altogether different interpretation.

After WW2, Shostakovich had begun using a four note phrase in his music: the notes D, E flat, C, B which, when said in the German manner, become D, Es, C, H – the first initial of his forename and the first three letters of his surname, in the German translation. The Eighth Quartet begins with exactly this phrase, confirming that this piece is not only about the victims of fascism and war; it is about himself. He then does something remarkable – he constructs a fugue with his own name. A fugue is among the most complex of musical forms – a way of layering a tune upon itself within a very rigid set of rules – and was precisely the kind of artistic complexity outlawed by the Soviet authorities. This isn’t only a daring and dangerous step on the part of the composer; it is a self-definition. “I am music”, Shostakovich seems to be saying here and, as if to prove the point, he offers a few quotations from past works, such as the opening bars of his 1^st Symphony, followed by a resolute restatement of his name.

It’s clear that this piece, in five continuous movements, was an intensely personal project for the composer. After his return from East Germany, he wrote to a friend “When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself... The pseudo-tragedy of the quartet is so great that, while composing it, my tears flowed as abundantly as urine after downing half a dozen beers. On arrival home, I have tried playing it twice, and have again shed tears. This time not because of the pseudo-tragedy, but because of my own wonder at the marvellous unity of form.” One could be forgiven for balking slightly at the apparent self-pity of the composer, but Shostakovich knew better than anyone that there was nothing unique about his own personal tragedy. The Jewish folk theme blasted out in the frantic second movement can be connected to one of the composer’s perennial concerns: the suffering of others at the hands of others. Shostakovich was submerged deep within the tragedy of the twentieth century and, with his unique ability to express that tragedy, offered a memorial to the suffering of one individual out of countless millions, namely himself. That this piece, and many others, survived and are today celebrated and loved, offers hope that the individual can endure in the face of overwhelming odds. And, that his music remains enigmatic to the last, never meaning quite what it appears to mean, is a fitting reminder that the dark and violent times for which it was written can never fully be comprehended.

Stop it, James

Hopping channels last night, I stumbled across BBC2’s Artsnight, a 30 minute show dumped in the gaping hole in the schedule left by the Beeb’s bizarre decision a few years ago to jettison Newsnight Review in favour of a monthly arts roundup. Satirist Armando Iannucci took an intriguing look at the role and value of the arts in contemporary society, alighting at classical music, one of his own personal passions. He spoke to pianist James Rhodes about the allure of classical music and about the state of the art today. Unsurprisingly, Rhodes continued the narrative of alarm he’s been peddling for a while. Not without good reason, of course, as we should all be concerned about falling audiences and funding opportunities. But Rhodes seems to have defined himself in direct opposition to the orthodox, to the “scowling pianist” stuffed in a white shirt and tails, and he seemingly needs to attack and caricature the “opposition” in order to justify his own approach.

There is, of course, room for many approaches, and I’m as proud a wearer of jeans to the opera as anyone else who doesn’t believe your attire helps you hear any better. But when speaking, in the short interview in last night’s programme, about the business of classical music, he’s just plain wrong. Despite Rhodes’s claim a new multi-million pound concert hall “seems to be a condition” of Simon Rattle’s arrival at the head of the London Symphony Orchestra, Rattle and the LSO have said that no such condition is in place. He went on:

“Take that £400 million – that’s 4 [or] 5 years of the entire music education budget! We don’t need another hall, and everyone who bleats about “oh well, the acoustics at the barbican aren’t...” Come on! Really? You really care that much? It’s like... Stop it!”

He’s certainly right that this is an enormous amount of money in the face of a culture of underinvestment in music education, but yes, the acoustics at the Barbican are insufficient to showcase the brilliance of an orchestra like the LSO, and no, we are not wrong or somehow elitist for caring that much. Neither is Rattle wrong to care, on two fronts: he is used to getting the best from some of the most miraculously brilliant ensembles in the world and is quite right to ask for the best conditions in which to make music. Secondly, his track record in Birmingham shows how reinvigorating such a project can be: the building of Symphony Hall was a milestone in the city’s cultural history and is a multi-purpose venue, as any in London would surely be.

Anyone who’s ever sat in the cheap seats, at the back of the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican or in the gods at the Royal Albert Hall can confirm that our precious, wonderful art-form can seem pretty remote and uninvolving from up there. A concern for how our music sounds is not incompatible with a desire to see more switched on to its wondrous brilliance. There are many valid arguments for and against the project, which I’ve no intention of further rehearsing here, but when it comes to the tedious ad hominem attacks on those of us who value slightly different things, please, James, stop it.